Star Wars_ Traitor Part 12

He picked up the neatly folded robeskin, and looked at it for a long moment, then shrugged and slipped it on over his head.

"How long before the Yuuzhan Vong arrive?"

"Look around you. They are already here."

"I mean, how long before something happens? How long can we stay here?"

"That depends." A soft chuckle came from the darkness. "How thirsty are you?"

"I don't understand."

"I'm told that a human can live three standard days without water--four or five, with careful conservation. Would it be too forward of me to suggest that we might leave in search of some, before you are too weak to move?"

Jacen stared into the darkness. "You're saying it's up to me?"

"Here, look at this." Out from the shadows flew a pale, irregular object half the size of Jacen's fist; it curved through a slow arc, gently tossed. Jacen caught it instinctively.

In the clear light reflected by the Bridge, he found the object to be rough-textured and lumpy, like a rounded hunk of limestone. It had several flattened nubs, sticky with a black, puttylike secretion, that might have been stumps where pieces had been broken off. The object as a whole seemed to be the yellowish white color of bleached bone, but all its cracks and crevices were crusted with something flaky, dark, brownish...

Blood. Dried blood.

"What is this thing?" A hard fist clenched the bottom of his throat, because he already knew. It was a slave seed. A mature slave seed. His slave seed. This was why he hadn't been in pain. He should throw it off the precipice: hurl it into the jungle of ferns a kilometer below. He should set it on the floor beside him and smash it flat with a hunk of duracrete: crush it into paste. He should hate it.

But he didn't. He stared at it, aching, astonished at the empty whistling loss that suddenly gaped inside him. Without thinking, he hiked up his robeskin and peeled back the strips that bound his chest, peering beneath them. On the spot where she had stabbed him so many weeks ago, he now bore a wider scar, as long as his finger, a scar the bright pink of newly healed flesh; she must have healed him with her tears, almost like bacta. He found he had to sit down. He sank in place with a sigh like an overloaded landing strut.

"You cut it out of me?"

"While you slept. You were unconscious for quite a while." Vergere moved slowly out of the shadows, and crouched at his side. "Are you all right?"

"I... I'm..." Jacen shook his head blankly. "I mean, thank you. I guess."

"Did you not want it removed?"

"Of course I... I mean, I did. I just, I don't know." He held it up into the softly s.h.i.+fting light.

"It's dead, isn't it?" Vergere nodded solemnly. "Once a slave seed has extended its tendrils throughout a host's nervous system, it is no longer an independent organism.

This one died within a minute of its removal."

"Yeah." Jacen's voice was barely more than a whisper. "I just feel- -I don't know. I hated it. I wanted it out of me. I wanted it dead--but, you know, while it was in me... it made me part of something. Like in the Nursery. During the fight, it was almost like having the Force again.

Now..."

"You feel empty," Vergere supplied. "You feel alone. Lonely. Almost frightened, but also strong, yes?" He stared at her.

"How?..."

"The name for what you are feeling," Vergere said through a slow, gentle smile, "is freedom."

Jacen snorted. "Some freedom."

"How did you expect it to feel? You are free, Jacen Solo, and that can be lonely, and empty, and frightening. But it is also powerful."

"You call this freedom? Sure, I'm free... on a ruined planet occupied by the enemy. No friends, no s.h.i.+p, no weapons. Without even the Force." He couldn't help thinking, Without even the slave seed. He glowered out into the gaudy s.h.i.+mmer of the Bridge.

"What good does freedom do me?"

Vergere settled into feline repose, arms and legs folded beneath her.

"Well," she said at length. "That's a question worth considering, yes?"

"Oh..." Jacen's breath caught in his throat. "That's what you meant just now? When I asked you what next?"

"You are free," she repeated. "Go where you will. Do what you will.

Be what you will."

"And what are you going to do?" Her smile s.h.i.+fted infinitesimally.

"What I will."

"So I can go? Just go? Walk off? Do whatever I want--and n.o.body will stop me?"

"I make no promises."

"How am I supposed to know what to do?"

"Ah..." Her smile expanded, and her eyes drifted closed. "...now we return to epistomology."

Jacen lowered his head. He'd lost what taste he'd ever had for playful banter. He realized, sitting there with Vergere reclining by his side, that this ledge, high up the side of a ruined building, was in its own way kind of like the Embrace of Pain. He could sit here until he rotted, wallowing in misery--or he could do something. But what? Nothing seemed to matter. On this shattered planet, each direction was as good as any other. There was nothing useful he could do--nothing within his reach that would make a difference to anyone but himself.

On the other hand, who says I have to be useful? And, sitting on that ledge, he discovered that there was one direction that still meant something to him. He got up.

Vergere opened her eyes. He parted the ferns, moving back into the night shadow beneath them, and found his way to the moss-covered wall.

Starting at one rear corner, he walked the wall's length, sc.r.a.ping a long strip of the moss aside with his hand. It came off easily, revealing blank duracrete beneath. He glanced over his shoulder at Vergere, who watched him silently through the screen of ferns. Shrugging, he went back to the corner and started along the adjoining wall. Three paces from the corner, his sc.r.a.ping fingers revealed a vertical crack, straight as a laser, bordered with metal strips; beyond the crack, the wall became durasteel, instead. Jacen felt around on the wall at about waist height until his fingers closed on a manual release. He turned it, pushed, and the durasteel door slid aside with an exhausted groan.

"What are you doing?"

Jacen didn't answer. Beyond lay a hallway that smelled of mildew, dimly lit by bulbous growths of phosph.o.r.escent lichen, its floor patched with ratty, insect-eaten carpeting.

It had been years since he had prowled the lower levels with Jaina and Lowie, Tenel Ka and Zekk, but the smell was unmistakable. The hallway was lined with numbered doors.

this had been one of the old midlevel apartment blocks. At the far end of the hall, an open arch led to emergency stairs. Jacen nodded to himself, and headed for the stairs without so much as a glance at Vergere.

Her voice echoed along the hall. "Where are you going?"

He didn't owe her any answers. Silently, he started down the stairs. The stairwell was walled with age-clouded transparent fiberplast, netted with reinforcing wire. Dimly through the webs of scratches, cracks, and wire, he could see a walkway, far below, leading into the blank black-stained wall of a neighboring building. Halfway down the first flight, he paused, sighing.

"You coming, or what?"

"Of course." Vergere appeared at the stairtop behind him, smiling broadly in the Bridgelight. "I was only waiting for you to ask."

SEVEN.

THE CRATER.

"This is Jacen Solo?" The master shaper, Ch'Gang Hool, stared in open horror at the image in the dwarf viewspider's sac of optical jelly.

A cl.u.s.ter of long, delicate tentacles implanted at the corner of his mouth twitched, knotting and unknotting itself, before reaching sinuous feelers upward to continue its jittery, nervously obsessive preening of the master shaper's starburst headdress.

"This--this is the Jacen Solo of Duro? The slayer of the voxyn queen? The Jeedai sought by Tsavong Lah?"

"It is."

"And this is the same Jeedai who sparked the slave revolt that came within a crizt of destroying the seeds.h.i.+p? The slave revolt that killed hundreds of our holy caste? The slave revolt that spat vicious infidel sc.u.m across my pristine planet?"

"Your planet, Master Shaper?"

"The shaping of this world is my honor, and my task!" Ch'Gang Hool snarled. "Until that work is done, every living thing in this stellar system answers to my will--even the fleet! Even the World Brain! If I choose to call this planet mine, who dares argue?

Who? You?"

"Oh, not I." A long forefinger tipped with curved talon tickled the dwarf viewspider on its control node, enlarging the image of Jacen Solo until the Jedi's head filled the optical sac. "For argument, I think you'd have to try him."

"How did he come to be here? How has he survived? It has been weeks since seedfall!

This dangerous Jeedai has been running loose all this time? Where has he been? Why have I not been informed?"

On the far side of the dwarf viewspider, Executor Nom Anor brandished his imperturbable needle-toothed smile.

"The warmaster orders that you bend all available resources toward his apprehension."

"Orders, does he?" Ch'Gang Hool's headdress bristled aggressively.

"Until he comes to take possession of this world, I am the ultimate authority here! We'll see about his orders!"

"Call it a suggestion, if you like." Nom Anor leaned forward, opening his hands, the perfect image of friendly reasonability.

"Nonetheless you are, as you say, responsible for the shaping of Yuuzhan'tar. I now have brought to your official attention that loose upon this planet's surface is this exceptionally dangerous Jedi; a Jedi who singlehandedly--what was your phrase? Ah, yes--came within a crizt of destroying the seeds.h.i.+p." Nom Anor settled back upon the pod beast, enjoying the ripple of its muscle beneath him as it adjusted its shape to support his new posture. Really, these shapers had it good--too good for their own good, he thought. Perhaps that was why he found it such a pleasure to spin this one up.

"How you meet this clear and immediate threat is--of course--entirely up to you."

Ch'Gang Hool scowled. "I have never yet heard adequately explained how this dangerous Jeedai came to be aboard the seeds.h.i.+p in the first place..."

"Direct all inquiries to the warmaster," Nom Anor advised airily.

"I am certain he'll be happy to take time out of fighting the war to answer your slightest, silliest concerns."

"Is it slight, that the Jeedai who slew our voxyn queen is at large upon our homeworld?" Ch'Gang Hool shook his eight-fingered master's fist at the executor. "Is it silly, to be alarmed to find we have been infiltrated by the single most dangerous enemy of our entire people?"

"Just between you and me and the viewspider, here," Nom Anor said agreeably, "what's slight is your niggling about some imaginary insult to your authority. What's silly is worrying about how Jacen Solo got here; you should be vastly more worried about what he is doing right now."

Rising blood pressure blued the master shaper's face.

"Where is he? You know, don't you?"

"Of course." Again, Nom Anor displayed his needle-pointed smile. "I was only waiting for you to ask."

There was something wrong about this crater. Jacen backed up along the notch in the crater's rim wall, frowning. Vergere, a few paces beyond, stopped when she sensed Jacen was no longer following, and she looked a question back at him. He shook his head.

"I have a bad feeling about this." The outer slope of the crater was a scree of rubble, spilling off exposed structural members of what had once been government offices; this section of the crater's rim had been a weight-bearing wall several kilometers high. The multicolored ferns and mosses covered it as though it were natural ground, but their roots were too shallow to bind the rubble solidly in place. They'd had to climb slowly, with Vergere in the lead. Jacen couldn't know if his next step might fall on a loose chunk of duracrete and trigger an avalanche, or send him tumbling through a crust of fibertile into some semi-intact room below. Vergere never explained how she was always able to find the safest path; Jacen a.s.sumed she was using some kind of Force-sense.

The notch had once been part of a vehicle accessway, possibly an air taxi stand; three meters or so of its reinforced sidewalls had survived the destruction of the surrounding building. Jacen settled into their shade, just deep enough that he could see down the crater's inner slope, and sat on a speeder-sized hunk of lichen-crusted wreckage. This crater...

It was big enough to swallow a Star Destroyer without a trace. Big enough to lose the seeds.h.i.+p in. It dropped forever away from them in a flattening curve, its bottom lost in black shadow: shadow cast by a billowing column of cloud that stretched up to a flat anvil top.

The cloud darkened as it descended, reaching deep into the crater, licking itself with forked tongues of lightning. Thunder rumbled up from below, and the air crackled with negative ions. Jacen swallowed.

"I have a bad feeling about this," he repeated. "And well you should."

Vergere hopped back to him, and settled onto the lichen beside him.

"No place on this planet is more dangerous."

"Dangerous..." he echoed.

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it in the Force."

She laced her fingers together into a bridge upon which she rested her chin, and smiled up at him.

"The question is, how did you know?"

He squinted at her, then turned his head to frown back out into the crater. How did he know? He sat in the shade of the ruined accessway wall, and thought about it. Weeks of trekking had thinned and hardened his body, carving him into knotted rope and tanned leather. His hair had grown out in unruly curls, now streaked with blond by the harsh ultraviolet of the blue-white sun. His thin, itchy teenager's beard had filled in, wiry, darker than his hair. He could have dug up some depilatory creme from an abandoned refresher along the way, or even a blade sharp enough to shave with, but he hadn't bothered. The beard protected his cheeks and jaw from sunburn. He could have picked up clothing, too, if he'd wanted it--he wore a pair of tough boots he'd found--but no regular clothing could be as durable, or as useful, as the robeskin.

Warm at night, cool during the day, self-cleaning, it even healed itself when it ripped. Beneath the robeskin, he wore the breechclout Vergere had fas.h.i.+oned for him. After he'd found the boots, he'd plaited strips torn from the robeskin to make himself a pair of self-cleaning socks that never wore out. The robeskin had proven useful in other ways, as well: across his back he wore a sizable knapsack, similarly plaited.

The strips had healed in place, making a living pack that never broke or wore out; like a muscle, the knapsack seemed to get stronger the more he used it. He carried it stuffed with as much food as would fit. One three-day stretch where they had been unable to scrounge a meal had cured him of any trust in his luck.

Food was available, if one looked hard enough: mostly breadmeal, sugar-yeast preserves, and the freeze-dried protein squares that had been staples of the downlevel dwellers. Maybe it didn't taste good, but none of that stuff ever spoiled. Unlike during the planet's former life as Coruscant, water was plentiful; hardly a day pa.s.sed without a rain squall, and fresh pools were easy to find among the rubble and wreckage.